The team tried working from 10am to 3:15pm, four days per week, on a number of those 8-week games. They found it actually worked fairly well in focusing people into doing targeted, specific work.

Wegner and Swink particularly suggested using ’single-tasking’ to really concentrate on one task for a limited amount of time, such as 48 minutes, which is “short enough that you can guilt yourself into it”, concluding that smart process can really make your game projects efficient and different.

In 2D Boy’s case, a WiiWare email promotion from Nintendo sold 25,000 copies of the game, a Steam 75% off sale helped push 42,000 copies in one weekend, and the MacHeist 3 promotion helped sell 88,000 copies in 2 weeks. Many of these were at much lower sales prices, but it all adds up.

Cross-promotion is also key. The main rabbit character in Overgrowth now appears, in various styles, in other indie games such as Cletus Clay and Gratuitous Space Battles. And getting the word out to the press, both via email and in person at conferences, is key to your product becoming recognizable and well promoted.

In addition, the Overgrowth creators noticed that only 30% of its traffic was coming from the U.S., and only 50% was from countries where the primary language was English. So they started their ‘Overt Ops’ program, with translations into 20+ languages and some notable pickup by Russian press.

Now the flood gates have been opened, and I am telling you to look out below. Today Reflexive, recently acquired by Amazon, opened their new download store, with lowered front tier pricing of $9.95 and second tier pricing of $6.95 for Indie casual games. All of the other casual portals like Big Fish Games and Yahoo games have pricing of of $6.95 by joining their “clubs”. It is my belief that even these prices will not hold up over time.

As an example of the future, look at the game section of the iPhone App Store. In this market, the right price for a game is $0, and I believe that is where all game prices are heading. For a while, there will be successes at $3.99 to $1, but eventually, I think you will see capitulation to the $0 price point.

You are probably one of the very few indie devs that constantly invest in marketing. What is your marketing budget and where do you advertise?

My marketing budget varies, but its basically about 90% of my day to day costs excluding paying contract artists. I probably get through about £450 a month on Google Adwords, and I advertise a fair few other places too. That really adds up. Over the year, you are talking maybe $10,000 on advertising, maybe more. I advertise in absolutely tons of places, but Google gets the lions share.

I had to click “buy it” links to check out your games prices. Do you think that it helps you sell more games this way?

Possibly. There is some chance that you increase the emotional connection with going through with the purchase by making them click, so they are already closer to a sale once they see the price. I’m not sure about that, because it’s an extra step in the process. I do it because it makes managing price changes and discounts easier.

After Blush, we’d eventually like to do some multiplayer stuff, some expressive build-y kinds of things, and some weirder more concept driven ideas. Really, it will depend on what we’re into when each 8-week cycle spins up. We’re spending two weeks every cycle to prototype ideas, and these prototypes will roll over and mature as time goes on. It’s like collecting minutes on your phone; eventually you can call grandma and read poetry for a solid 20 hours without worrying about the bill. We look forward to it every year. It’s safe to say we’ll be lazy and do a sequel of something sometime, too. Something popular.

90%, that’s the approximate piracy rate for the pc version of world of goo. we casually mentioned that number recently and the news seemed to propagate far and wide, so we’d like to follow up with some more details, for those interested. first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.2D Boy: I love you, 2D Boy! » Blog Archive » 90%

Graduates of schools that teach game development and design may have a leg up on others trying to break into the video game field… in many cases they created as classwork a game that could stir the interest of a studio or publisher. But wait! Whose IP is that game anyway — the student’s or the college’s?Gamasutra - Controversy In The Classroom: Whose IP Is It Anyway?

The design of the demo should be core to the design of the game. If you expect that you can get away with simply limiting content and play time, your game will sell a tenth of what it should. Instead, if you focus on what the customer actually gets to touch before they buy the game, you will be more likely to get them to pull out their credit card. This means scaling that tutorial WAAAYYY back and focusing on the first 30 minutes to provide quick progression, fun gameplay, and flashy graphics. I made the “explain everything in the tutorial up front” mistake on my second game, Venture Arctic, and it really hurt sales. People lost interest before they got to the fun parts.
-> NotesOnGameDev.net » What Every Indie Needs to Know

People said the puzzles in Grim were super hard, and I’ve always maintained that this was due to a deep character flaw or mental illness on the part of the player. But now, reading this again, I’ve realized that holy smokes—Some of them puzzles were nuts. Obscure. Mean, even. I blame Peter Chan, because he will never read this post to know that I blamed him.
-> GRIM FANDANGO : game documentation en PDF

—————————————————————————–

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
Metalosis Maligna is a documentary by Floris Kaayk about a disease which affects patients with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.

->Meridian4 and Frogames Raise Awareness for Penguins’ Struggle!Meridian4 ( http://www.meridian4.com) is chilled to announce that they have signed an agreement with Frogames to help digitally distribute their FPS (First Penguin Shooter) through numerous online sites across the net.
Ca ca veut certainement dire que la machine est en route… :)

We’ve got a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910 — and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.-> Chart Porn: War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production
C’est un peu tiré par les cheveux. Mais c’est tout de même une révélation pour moi : j’ai loupé plein de films de zombies !!!

“Jim: Okay, let’s talk about what players are going to get up to in the world a little more. Some people who read my initial account of you showing me the game were surprised to see combat in the trailer - is that fair? Should they have expected to see something else? I was expecting to see combat, but I think from the name of the game people were expecting it to be more about building, peaceful activities etc.Eskil: I cant speak for expectations, but my idea has always been to make an adventure game, and part of that will be combat. My feeling is that a specific type of combat in games have disappeared.
Early games like Doom and Quake, although first person shooters, have in many ways more in common with 2D scrolling shooters then with modern games like Gears of War, or COD4. So in a way I wanted to get back to that. Talking about the trailer, its also about showing something that is true to what i have at the moment and not try to fake something that I may create in the future. I want to do may things with LOVE in the future, but I don’t want hype things that I haven’t done yet.”
— RPS Interview: Love | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Plein d’infos sur LOVE :)

“This is a story about how I took an idea and made it into a commercial game. In this article I will try to focus on how to get a game done - a problem many independent developers face. During the development of my game, Asterope, I took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life.”
— GameDev.net - Start to Finish: Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game

“We’re told “there are still plans for a World of Warcraft movie” and that “the script is being written but if they say anything more than that they will be shot”.”
— Moviehole. World of Warcraft movie update

—————————————————————————–

“Dustin Browder: I think a lot of guys on the Internet just saw the headline and just assumed that this meant “Oh my God, I have to buy three different boxes and they’re probably all going to ship at the same time, and they’re just trying to milk me for money.” And that’s just not the case. These things are going to be a trilogy; it’s chapters of a story. They’re going to be months or years apart as we work on them—obviously, closer to months, we hope. [laughs]
Bob Colayco: Minimum, a year between each.”
— Q&A: The Starcraft II Brain Trust - giantbomb.com